The truth of Rodney King.

• Author: Jordan, June

April 17, 1993, and a Federal jury has found two Los Angeles policemen guilty in the beating of Rodney King twenty-five months ago. This same jury found the other two police defendants not guilty. And, immediately, attorneys for the convicted have declared their intention to appeal. So, today, there is less than a full-fledged national disgrace recurring in Los Angeles.

But we would be ill-advised to assume that even this partial delivery of justice will stand. And we would be oblivious to brutal colonial attitudes if we did not note and decry that the overwhelming state response to the first miscarriage of justice has been paramilitary, at best. There has been no top priority of focus and think-tank frenzy to relieve the beleaguered citizens of South Central Los Angeles with money and programs that could lift them out of the violence of poverty and the violence of unequal protection under the law.

Nothing basic has changed. And so my spirit remains riveted, still, with grief and misgivings, to one year ago: On April 29, 1992, the whole world learned of the Simi Valley verdict of "not guilty" in the first trial of the Los Angeles policemen accused of brutally beating an unarmed African-American man named Rodney King.

My own initial reaction to this terrible and completely shocking news was to burst into tears of bitterness and terror: In my lifetime, will violence ever be made to stop inside the national black community? In my lifetime, will the American system of justice ever deliver anything besides injustice to the black community?

Because there had been a videotape documentary of the police assault on Rodney King, I had expected, along with millions of other African-Americans, that for once the guilty would be punished and the victim would be protected by due process under the law. But the visual documentary evidence of unlawful police violence - evidence that was sickening to watch even at the remove of a TV set - that evidence did not carry the day. Racism carried the day.

According to a defense attorney, hideous, monster images of black men as wild and depraved subhuman creatures motivated Los Angeles police to attack one unarmed African-American man with nauseating and relentless savagery.

And where did the police acquire such racist images?

Is it not the case that American media coverage of young black men promotes such violent, such vicious fantasy?

Is it not the case that, as Malcolm X observed, media coverage of blackfolks serves to criminalize the black community in the minds of white America and, having criminalized our community, police violence against our communities appears justified and necessary to most Americans?

Is it not the case that the lamentable nature of our usual school curriculum is such that most white Americans, most Asian-Americans, most Latino-Americans, and even a sadly significant number of African-Americans, ourselves, do not learn anything important and accurate about African-American history, or culture, and so in the absence of coherent, valid, historical instruction, all of these various Americans accept the cultural perversities of media coverage as objective, reliable, and truthful information?

It was that very same one unarmed African-American man, Rodney King, the victim of inarguable and unlawful police savagery, it was he who said through the microphones of the press that rushed to cover the L.A. uprising against the injustice of the Simi Valley verdict, "Please can we get along here. . . . We all can get along. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's try to work it out."

These were the words of the black man who, allegedly, so terrified the L.A. police that they could not help but beat and stomp him almost to death. You would think that, perhaps, the truth of his being that spoke to his countrymen beginning with the word "please" might well explode and exorcise the racist...